I have to admit that I don’t understand the “I am the 99%” shtick coming out of OWS. If these people are saying that 99% of the country is poor, with only 1% holding the wealth, perhaps I don’t understand poverty as well as I should. When I think of poverty, I think of this:

Slum outside Jakarta

or this:

A Favela in Brazil

or this:

East African Famine Victim

What I don’t think of when I think of poverty is this:

The computer crowd at OWS; photo by David Shankbone

or this:

Socialism is a good way to dump debt; photo by David Shankbone

or this:

Fit, bejeweled and spiritual at OWS; photo by David Shankbone

But in a peculiar way, those non-starving, non-homeless, non-refugee young people playing at being poor in cities across America have a point. They represent some very specific — and sad — types of poverty.

To begin with, there’s the sense of poverty created by utterly ludicrous expectations. We promised these kids that they were all “good enough, smart enough and, gosh darn it!, that everyone would like them.” We promised them that they were all number one, and that they would never need to make any actual effort to achieve that blue ribbon status. We taught them, through MTV and computer games, that a 3 minute attention span is sufficiently long to be awesomely cool and win the game. And, God help us, we taught them that a Womyn’s Studies, or Africana Studies, or GLBT Studies, or Oppressed People’s degree from some big name university would assure them the kind of job that would enable them to pay off $25,000 or $100,000 or even $250,000 in student loans. We, the older generation, created this wealth of stupidity.

These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty. One of the things that shines through when we interview the people taking to the streets is that so many are woefully ignorant, and that they wallow in a sea of relativism that allows for no morality other than that gained by intense navel gazing. They are the antithesis of the original American revolutionaries, whose leaders were men of exceptional erudition and thoughtfulness, and whose followers knew at the very least their Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. Revolutionaries of old were shaped by philosophy, known science, literature, practical life experience, and a deep sense of morality and justice. Today’s little park piddlers are shaped by an aching sense of unfairness, a terrible fear of human-kind (that would be the AGW shtick), and a morality shaped by Oprah and whichever fabulously rich Hollywood Leftist happens to grab the microphone on any given day.

These self-styled 99%-ers are not poor, not by any known standard, either today or in the history of the world. They are intellectually and emotionally bereft, but otherwise awash in material benefits.

The fact that these posers aren’t poor, as poverty has traditionally been understood, does not mean that there aren’t poor people in America. New immigrants are poor, although America quickly absorbs them and propels their children and grandchildren into the working and middle class. Elderly people whose life savings have been destroyed by the Democrat economy are poor, and deserve our help. Those who suffer from profound physical or mentally disabilities, through birth or injury, may experience great poverty, and they too deserve our help. Those are traditional kinds of poverty and, true to Jesus’ word, we will always have these people with us.

Lastly, there is a unique kind of poverty, one that could only occur in America. I know about this poverty because someone close to me dwells among these poor (although she is not quite of them), and reports back faithfully. These are not people who are poor in the old-fashioned way. They were not deprived of opportunities due to class distinctions, because we do not have a European-style class-based society. Although most are profoundly ignorant, all had available to them the basics of an American public school education. Living in the modern age, their lives have not been blighted by epidemic diseases (polio, rheumatic fever, mumps, measles, small pox, etc.), nor have their family structures been decimated by the mortality that ripped through the pre-modern world, leaving large numbers of children as half or full orphans.

What these people are is the self-inflicted poor. For example, meet my friend’s neighbors: there’s John, surviving on welfare and food stamps, who was a “tweeker” (methamphetamine user); Abby, who almost died from a month-long coma after a heroine binge, and now gets intermittent work cleaning houses, when her health allows; Ray, who is an alcoholic, and floats from one unskilled job to another; Shannon, who has three children, by three men, and has had all three children taken away by social services because of her drug habit. Oh, and let me not forget Fred, who is homeless because he fried his synapses both with drugs and with the head injury from a drunk driving accident. The only time he wasn’t homeless recently was when he spent two years in jail for statutory rape. As my friend said to him, “You’re old, ugly and homeless. The only reason a young girl hit on you was to get your drugs, and you should have known better.”

Again, Jesus was right “The poor ye always have with you.” No matter how much you perfect your society, you will still be dealing with human imperfection. You will deal with the people who came from dysfunctional homes and continue that dysfunction (with or without help from social services); and with the people who came from totally normal homes (as did my friend) but who were inexorably drawn to a dysfunctional culture. You cannot save them. They willingly embrace habits that lead inexorably to poverty. These are the HONDAs (hypertensive, obese, non-compliant, diabetic, alcoholics), who suck up a doctor’s clinic time; the over-dosers who are rushed into ER while the kid with the broken arm (and insurance) sits in the waiting room; and the drunk drivers whose irresponsibility tears apart families. They are the ones who crowd the welfare roles, live in parks, eat at the homeless shelters, and rotate through jails. They are the imperfect ones. We will always have them with us, and no amount of Leftist utopianism will change that reality.

History shows, though, that there is one solution to minimize the overall number of poor: a free, capitalist society. While there will always be the old, the sick and the stupid, our American experiment with freedom and capitalism creates sufficient plenty that even poor people, provided that they are functional poor rather than dysfunctional poor, can get sufficient calories, have housing, wear stylish clothes, carry a cell phone, watch television, etc. A rising tide lifts all boats, even the smallest dinghies.

Bookworm is a writer living in Marin, California. Her personal blog is Bookworm Room.

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1.
jd

A poverty of values.
They want their college loans, that they entered into voluntarily, to be forgiven at the expense of others. They want debt in general, that was entered into voluntarily, to be forgiven at the expense of others.

They believe that as long as the right people lose property it’s okay. Note how when they were stolen from it was suddenly a problem. (I guess when it’s not the state stealing from you it’s wrong or some such.)

These people are the natural product of an upbringing in which there were no winners and losers, only winners, everyone gets a trophy et. al.

The only coherent message they have been able to produce as a group: “The World Won’t Accomadate Me.”

Hi Snork. Fair question. I’m one of those. I embraced the hippy culture when young, except by that time I was too late to join the hippy movement. So I became a freak, did drugs, rebelled and dropped out from society when doers my age attended trade school or college and get their feet in the door of upward mobility.

I supported socialist fantasies, along with many of my compatriots. Some of them went on to college, as I did, but they became teachers while I went for horticulture, beginning my path to productive jobs. My fellow travelers who became teachers began our descent into the reeducation system we have today. They taught another generation of teachers, who are not teaching our grandchildren just as Bookworm describes. We control the universities, or more importantly, the prevailing thought patterns being taught at universities.

So, it is my generation who is responsible in large part for the Obama’s, Community Activists, and Occupiers we have today.

You’re a little too hard on yourself. We “boomers” mostly hopped on board the ride created by older radicals and “hipsters” of the “beat generation.” We were too young to actually set the Aquarian Age in motion.

What is stunning to me is the total inability of societies to retain ANY memory of events even just a generation removed. In observing the ‘Lord of the Flies’ deterioration of the #OWS encampments, I see a fast-forward compression of the so-called 60′s (actually 1966 to 1972). “We” as a society have learned nothing. The embrace of these amoral cretins by the Democrats, celebrities, and the media is an appalling indictment of their shallowness and mendacity.

Well, there ARE wars to protest. At least 3 of them, even if you try word chicanery to try and get around it.

In fact, it wasn’t very long ago that there WERE protesters on the war. Then a democrat won the levers of the war machine. They pretty much patted themselves on the back and went home. Yet the wars continue.

The problem is, they have anger issues, and they want to burn off the excess. And the only way to do that is to channel it. Their targets? Either themselves, or the ‘Other’. Few want to blame themselves or hate themselves. Moreso if your little mush-filled skull was taught time after time that you never do any wrong.

Since Obama’s their guy, hating on him means they made a mistake… which means they would have to accept blame. No way that’s happening. So they go after the soft target, making themselves feel good AND not having to go through the pain of a paradigm shift. Their world remains whole and complete by discarding the conflicting bits of data that would challenge them: their man failed in many ways, likely making it even worse. The very schools they attended gouged their future with high debts that not even bankruptcy can dispel. Worse, those same schools made them pay extra for a bill of goods; classes and courses that do not help with jobs or for a particular job area (Law) that is over-saturated to the point that it became funny, then unfunny once more.

But those facts would mean they made a mistake, or ‘their people’ harmed them either accidentially or maliciously. No. Easier to blame the bankers.

**These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty.**

Funny how history repeats itself. “These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty” tagged many the same way during the 60′s and 70′s revolution, but how many of them became the nations educators, business leaders and politicians of today? One can filter any movement and focus on the weirdo’s but that is probably not the wise thing to do. I can recall certain media venues doing the same during the haydays of the Tea Party movement around the nation not so long ago.

Seems their central messaging of private sector corruption, greed and economic disparity is a worthy one unless one chooses to stick their head in the sand and ignore such realities occuring increasingly over the past couple of decades. Likewise, many of them are smart enough to read government charts and data showing that the most wealthy individuals and corporations pay a much lesser percentage in taxes regardless of what their legislated tax ‘rate’ may be.

Sometimes the message is more relevant than the messenger!

The greed of labor unions, and ultimately their employers and Wall Street over several decades gave birth to a cancer that is now destroying America. Is that such a bad message? Now, some have begun to learn that the government can no longer prop up a corrupted and failed private sector economy. Is that a bad thing? Don’t the younger generations have a vested interest in their futures and that of America? Seems rather arrogant that the generations who ‘feasted’ on the private sector greed and corruption of the past several decades should care nothing about the younger generations and the condition of the country being handed to them.

No other nation has produced as many ‘intellectuals’ as America has over the past several decades and yet look at the nation they are handing to the newer generations of the present and the future. So, I wouldn’t be so fast to arrogantly condemn the rebeling people as a mob of stupid and irrelevant. Funny thing about most who consider themselves as intellectuals. Few have ever produced or contributed to anything tangible. Just look at the millions who hock their opinions for profit and yet, look at the nation and the world today.

“Funny how history repeats itself. “These young people also suffer from a vast intellectual and moral poverty” tagged many the same way during the 60′s and 70′s revolution, but how many of them became the nations educators, business leaders and politicians of today?”

And how many of the OWS lot are their progeny? How many educated by them? How many have watched news reports by them?

Oh, by the way, not too many went on to get into business, those were all the one’s not protesting and such.

Which is why they are odd man out being protested by those with even less moral and intelectual ammunition than the 60′s protestors who educated and inspired them.

The protesters in the 60s and 70s were overturning long-standing social and political assumptions. It was assumed that they would volunteer or submit to the draft like good, patriotic Americans, answering “their country’s call.” They overturned that assumption. They were telling the Establishment something new and different: No, we’re not going to allow ourselves to become cannon fodder in a pointless Asian war. New. Different. Shocking. Informative.

The OWS gang are not telling us anything we didn’t already know. The Left has been harping on wealth inequality for years and everyone knows Wall Street’s “creative” business practices, in part, are responsible for the mess we’re in. They’re “drawing attention” to things that have been occupying our attention for many, many months now, without their help.

The reason is that there are simply people in our culture who react to things by acting out – by protesting or whatever. Other people write editorials or run for office. These guys camp out in a park and wave signs. A protest, in 2011, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t show that the Masses have had enough and are taking matters into their own hands. It’s just part of the political sideshow.

All true. Oh, and by the way, speaking of the utopian “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” sought by this group of dysfunctional idiots, don’t forget that the level of alcoholism and domestic abuse plus poverty of housing, food, and clothing in the Soviet Union far exceeded anything we have ever seen here. There was a true one percent of “haves” and a 99 percent of “have nots.”

you know, it’s easier to find a copy of Victor Frankl’s bit about finding your own values. Then he gets quoted everywhere, as a sage and prophet of the 20th century. Add in stuff like Joan Borysenko as a religious authority- again, go find your own moral worth. It’s really actually really hard to find anything other than belly- lint worship in most places- public libraries, bookstores, and so on. Ask a bookstore clerk- they aren’t usually going to point you to a catechism- there’s a chance they don’t sell them. They might not even know about it. So, even if you’re looking, you might not be able to find what will help. Victor Frankl gets assigned in college classes, even high school classes. You have to already know enough to sign up to a religious school to find any other way of thought. It’s honestly very hard to find a way to another way of thinking.

I know- you say a church is on every corner. But if you’ve grown up leftist- that church is the belly- button of evil. You don’t willingly walk into the American Nazi Party headquarters, or turn your sheets into KKK outfits: that’s what it would feel like for a leftist.

OWS is what happens when a kid is twenty before someone finally tells him “No.” And means it.

These protesters are a classic example of premature affluence. Thanks to generous parents and student loans, they’ve not actually had to work to earn the money for those organic cotton threads and Apple devices, not now and not when they were teens. Until recently, one suspects they’ve also been housed in recently renovated dorms and eaten meals provided by colleges whose main goal is to earn an A+ for student life on the College Prowler website, instead of actually educating the students.

But now the money has run out and the kids have worthless degrees. Their parents, who have showered every material good (but precious few intellectual and moral ones) on them since they were tots, have finally been forced to turn off the spigot. After all, though the kids have been raised like trustafarians, most of them aren’t. They just feel that way.
However, the real world doesn’t care what one feels entitled to, only what one can produce, which in this case is not much.

Beautiful message! I hope a new generation of parents will refuse to blame the selfish, entitled, ignorant, celebrity-obsessed, work-averse, slacker youth for simply being a product of their environment; yet will look to themselves to instill in their children the morals and values of greater generations past; those values that helped build America into the single-greatest nation in the history of the work. This beautiful country has more than enough opportunity to go around for those who are willing to work hard, help others, be self-sufficient, decent, caring, thoughtful human beings. Trophies are only for those who win, monetary rewards are only for those who succeed, education is only for those willing to earn earn it. These are not inalienable rights, these are privileges that come with responsibility. Will we teach our children, in the words of the Democrats’own demigod, to ask, “not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country. Its up to us to change the tide! I for one can attest that my daughter will be instilled with these values. Will yours?

I don’t think the protesters are calling themselves poor, at least that isn’t my reading of it. I think they are protesting the system which has made education at the higher level impossible to afford without a loan, which has made politicians into philanderers and sellouts to the highest bidders and has made a mockery of the sense of fairness and dignity that used to describe the United States in general.

Fairness? What is this word, “fair”? That these people, doing the 60′s thing they’ve read about and worshipped, should think that it just isn’t fair that college costs a lot of time and money, and that getting a job means you have to be qualified FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF AN EMPLOYER (you know, the person who judges you on your appearance and manners and ability to write a simple sentence (one with a subject and a predicate… how booorrrrring, eh?)

I love the remark about the $100 shoes on the spiritual dolly. I guess she is ‘spiritual’ because she can sit in the lotus position long enough to be photographed.

Kate, I am not one to forgive the outrageous cost of higher education today, although I will say that twenty years ago I too incurred outrageous student loans and slowly and painfully managed to pay them off. But I would look to the universities and colleges as co conspirators. It is unlikely that the endowments are going to the students, and a sober look at faculty would probably show a fair amount of money being thrown their way as well. As to degrees that do not result in jobs, well, despite the economy, certainly the field of study was a choice. And there are no guarantees. That said, fear not. I do not think these overburdened occupiers will have this problem much longer. Rumor has it that Obama is going to give a speech tomorrow regarding this “problem” of student loans. It is most likely that after this speech,the horrid capitalist taxpayers will once again be on the hook for those loans somehow. And it is unlikely that Obama will lead with how this ultimately will be paid for by hardworking people still fortunate enough to have a job and pay those taxes. It should be remembered that in the real world there is no such thing as government money.

“We taught them, through MTV and computer games, that a 3 minute attention span is sufficiently long to be awesomely cool and win the game.”

MTV and computer games is a complaint against the teens of the ’80. These are the teens of the ’00s. These guys probably don’t remember MTV playing music videos or computer games that take less than 20 hours.

Then why aren’t these louts down at the local college green raising havoc at their idiot leftist professors who conned them into worthless degrees at an oxorbinant cost?

I will tell you why…they are braindead dopes who stupidly listen to some of the stupidest “intellectuals” around wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on 6 years of partying for their asinine “women, transvestite, or hate whitey” studies degrees listening to these idiots, like Ward Churchill. Only now they find that their professors were scamming them and the degrees do not even qualify them to salt the fries at the local burger shop and they want the good times on other people’s money to continue.

The biggest protest target of these morons is common sense, intelligence and a bar of soap.

I live north of El Paso TX(Juarez Mexico) in New Mexico. The slums or shanties are horrific and always humble me…the occupiers only remind me of the me myself and I generation. They think of nothing else and have no real clue on anything.

I doubt they will ever understand and I pray they never realize the poverty shown in the first photos.

Greed impells one to produce, trade, acquire, sometimes steal. Envy impells one to steal. Capitalism distributes benefits by voluntary exchange. Politics distributes them by coercion. Crony capitalism, which we are enduring, mixes greed and envy, exchange and coercion. Not nice.

When the judges ruled, there was a severe famine in the land of Israel. Ten severe famines were decreed from Heaven to be in the world from the day of the creation of the world until the time when the Messiah shall come, to reprove mankind.

The first famine was in the days of Adam.

The second famine was in the days of Lamech.

The third famine was in the days of Abraham. The fourth famine was in the days of Isaac.

The fifth famine was in the days of Jacob.

The sixth famine was in the days of Boaz, who was called the Righteous, and who was from Bethlehem.

The seventh famine was in the days of David, the King of Israel.

The eighth famine was in the days of Elijah the prophet.

The ninth famine was in the days of Elisha in Samaria.

The tenth famine will be not a not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord [Amos 8:11].

Amos indeed prophesied the famine of the Word that now afflicts not only Israel but the whole world, but it is also prophesied that the birth pangs of the Messiah include severe famine, culminating in a famine so great that a day’s ration of wheat will cost a day’s wage (it isn’t clear from the text a day’s wage according to whom, as wages vary considerably across the world, but the text says that a day’s ration of wheat will cost a denarius, as will three days’ ration of barley).